The openSUSE conference will feature Georg Greve as first keynote speaker, opening the event on Friday morning. He will talk about “Freedom in the world we live in and the value and importance of communities and Software Freedom”. That’s a mouthful and we’ve asked him to tell us a bit about himself and what he’ll talk about.

Personal life

We managed to catch him just before he was going to Hamburg for the holidays with the family, actively cleaning up the house and preparing for an early leave the next morning. Georg, born in ’73 on the tiny island of Helgoland outside the coast of northern Germany, spent the first 8 years of his life in this reclusive community before moving to the big city. There he studied biophysics and came across Free Software in 1993. Five years later he was the European speaker for the GNU Project, writing the well known ‘Brave GNU World’ column and in 2001 he initiated the Free Software Foundation Europe. Since 2009 he is the CEO of Kolab Systems AG and lives with his wife and “two utterly gorgeous” twin boys in the neighborhood of Zurich, Switzerland.

Free Software

We asked him about what he will share with us at the openSUSE Conference.

Georg: “I’m sure everybody is aware of current events around the leak of Prism. Watching it all unfold has been interesting from a variety of angles, both for our communities as well as the larger version of community: society at large. It is awesome that people look at what is going on, care and get upset. But at the same time, it is weird that they get upset now as much of this has been known for quite a while. If you cared for this topic at all you could have learned all of this from public sources in the past. Not with such detail and in such depth or with the drama, but the gist of it was actually not very much hidden. The fact that the USA treats its own interest above everything else and isn’t shy to use its power, knowledge and military for its self interest and most importantly the interest of its corporations isn’t exactly news. It has been like this for quite a while and they have been quite upfront about it.”

Jos: But at least people are angry about it, now…

Frenemies?

Georg: “People are shocked. But a few years too late. It is good that they are but we should ask the question: why is it worse to give your data to the government (which may use it in name of the corporations) rather than giving it to the corporations directly?

And people give their data willingly. Even the public sector is affected, just last week the Swedish government banned Google Apps usage in Sweden. They noted that it could not be guaranteed that the data would remain private. News, really? Perhaps there will be some rethinking …

For those of you waiting for (or working on) openSUSE 13.1, we have good news: milestone 2 is now out for you to download. As to be exptected, the inclusion of newer software versions is the highlight of this release. Broken in M1 and fixed now are automake, boost, and webyast. But first, let’s talk openSUSE 12.1: it is no longer maintained.

openSUSE 12.1 no longer maintained

openSUSE 12.1 has reached end of life. This release came into the world on the 16th of November 2011, giving it a life span of about 19 months. With openSUSE releasing new versions every 8 months, this means there are already a 12.2 and an 12.3 – with 13.1 to be released by the end of this year! For 12.1 users, the time has come to move on to a newer version and benefit from more, better and faster software!

As the announcement from the security- and maintenance team explains:

openSUSE 12.1 was the first openSUSE distribution maintained using OpenBuildService methods (known as “OBS Maintenance”), allowing full community participation, from the beginning.

Currently, there are no plans to add 12.1 to the evergreen-project. If something changes, I’ll inform you as soon as possible.

Here are some statistics of our released updates (compared to 11.4):

• Total updates: 789 (+65)
• Security: 389 (-28)
• Recommended: 398 (+92)
• Optional: 2 (+1)

• Fixed CVE-entries: 1508 (+193)
• Fixed Bugs (overall): 1874 (+319)

The increase of the resolved issues is related to the easier participation in working on openSUSE with the OpenBuildService.
Thanks on this point to our awesome packagers, community and OpenBuildService-Team!

Your maintenance- and security-team

Changes, changes: openSUSE 13.1 M2 is out!

With M2 out, openSUSE 13.1 is still in an early period of development and lots of changes are coming. The most notable list of changes made in Milestone 2 includes:

• livecds using overlayfs now with persistent hybrid support
• automake 1.12.1->1.13.2
• boost 1.49.0->1.53.0
• util-linux 2.21.2->2.23.1
• evolution 3.8.1->3.9.1
• gtk3 3.8.1->3.9.0
• icu 50.1.2->51.2
• iproute2 3.7.0->3.9.0
• kernel 3.9.0->3.10.rc4
• libreoffice 4.0.2.2.1->4.0.3.3.2
• MozillaFirefox 20.0->21.0
• pulseaudio 3.0->4.0
• qemu 1.4.0->1.5.0

For Milestone 3 the major goals are to bring Perl 5.18 and GCC 4.8 on board. You can get Milestone one from software.opensuse.org.

Most Annoying Bugs

The list of most annoying bugs is still short. We’re looking towards you to help us make that list bigger! We need to find out what’s wrong so we can fix it. You can report bugs with this link. The process of reporting bugs involves a couple of steps that you can take in order to contribute with the …

the openSUSE Conference kicks off in less than 6 weeks! The conference Paper Committee has been receiving and judging a lot of presentation proposals and while there is still time to send in papers, a number of sessions has been confirmed already. In this article we will present you some of these sessions!

Community and Project

The Community and Project track gathers talks around openSUSE and community activities, quoting the CfP page: “including but not limited to project governance, marketing, artwork, ambassador reports, collaboration with other FOSS communities and other topics”.

Find the geeko

Currently accepted talks will introduce local openSUSE communities, intro the new ambassador and merchandising programs and discuss Free and open in general.

One particularly interesting subject will be openSUSE statistics. It is given by Athanasios Ilias “zoumpis” Rousinopoulos, student and Greek openSUSE ambassador from Spain (long story…) and Alberto “aplanas” Planas from the openSUSE team. They will each talk about numbers in a different area. Zoumpis is a MSc student doing research on doing quantitative analysis on communication in Free Software projects. He has studied the openSUSE repositories, mailing lists and bugzilla and extracted information from them. He will analyze the activity of the openSUSE community with interesting graphs and statistics!

Alberto has been working on measuring statistics before, during and after the openSUSE release. How many downloads does openSUSE have, how many installations? And where do these numbers go? This gives interesting insights in where we, as a community, are going and what options we have before us.

Geeko Tech

An interesting array of speakers will give attendees insight into the inner workings of openSUSE during the great workshops and talks on the Geeko Tech track. Although it often seems that openSUSE works by an act of magic, reality is that there are very dedicated developers behind it. Here is a snippet of sessions dealing with the more technical aspects of openSUSE.

Starting with the Open Build Service, Henne Vogelsang will deliver a two-part masters workshop on how to get your packages processed by OBS. Ranging from the conception of new packages to updates for older releases, Henne will show the way.

Making sure that openSUSE stays stable is important for a good User-distribution relationship! What started as a way to improve quality for the final release of openSUSE by Bernhard Wiedemann became a important project to improve development of openSUSE. Through his mighty Perl scripts openQA is able to provide information to users about the state of openSUSE’s stability during development. A workshop and a talk dealing with the subject will teach attendees to use openQA to find and report issues and build further test cases, helping make sure that we all have the best openSUSE available.

Other talks include Lars Vogdt presentation of openSUSE’s infrastructure, showing what’s behind building and serving a Linux Distribution; a review of what openSUSE can do to make a tastier Raspberry Pi, making sure that openSUSE’s installations are secure and how you can carry …